Highway driving invariably combines high speeds with the need to interact closely with other drivers. Prediction methods enable autonomous vehicles (AVs) to anticipate drivers' future trajectories and plan accordingly. Kinematic methods for prediction have traditionally ignored the presence of other drivers, or made predictions only for a limited set of scenarios. Data-driven approaches fill this gap by learning from large datasets to predict trajectories in general scenarios. While they achieve high accuracy, they also lose the interpretability and tools for model validation enjoyed by kinematic methods. This letter proposes a novel kinematic model to describe car-following and lane change behavior, and extends it to predict trajectories in general scenarios. Experiments on highway datasets under varied sensing conditions demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
Integrating trajectory prediction to the decision-making and planning modules of modular autonomous driving systems is expected to improve the safety and efficiency of self-driving vehicles. However, a vehicle's future trajectory prediction is a challenging task since it is affected by the social interactive behaviors of neighboring vehicles, and the number of neighboring vehicles can vary in different situations. This work proposes a GNN-RNN based Encoder-Decoder network for interaction-aware trajectory prediction, where vehicles' dynamics features are extracted from their historical tracks u…
Highway driving places significant demands on human drivers and autonomous vehicles (AVs) alike due to high speeds and the complex interactions in dense traffic. Merging onto the highway poses additional challenges by limiting the amount of time available for decision-making. Predicting others' trajectories accurately and quickly is crucial to safely executing maneuvers. Many existing prediction methods based on neural networks have focused on modeling interactions to achieve better accuracy while assuming the existence of observation windows over 3s long. This paper proposes a novel probabili…
MINES ParisTech（巴黎高等矿业学院）；PSL Research University（巴黎文理研究大学）；École des Ponts ParisTech（巴黎高科桥路学校）
In order to drive safely and efficiently on public roads, autonomous vehicles will have to understand the intentions of surrounding vehicles, and adapt their own behavior accordingly. If experienced human drivers are generally good at inferring other vehicles' motion up to a few seconds in the future, most current Advanced Driving Assistance Systems (ADAS) are unable to perform such medium-term forecasts, and are usually limited to high-likelihood situations such as emergency braking. In this article, we present a first step towards consistent trajectory prediction by introducing a long short-…
Alibaba-NTU Singapore Joint Research Institute, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学阿里巴巴-南洋理工大学新加坡联合研究院）；DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团达摩院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
It has become a consensus that autonomous vehicles (AVs) will first be widely deployed on highways. However, the complexity of highway interchanges becomes the bottleneck for deploying AVs. An AV should be sufficiently tested under different highway interchanges, which is still challenging due to the lack of available datasets containing diverse highway interchanges. In this paper, we propose a model-driven method, FLYOVER, to generate a dataset consisting of diverse interchanges with measurable diversity coverage. First, FLYOVER proposes a labeled digraph to model the topology of an interchan…
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Honda Research Institute（本田研究院）
This paper proposes a hierarchical autonomous vehicle navigation architecture, composed of a high-level speed and lane advisory system (SLAS) coupled with low-level trajectory generation and trajectory following modules. Specifically, we target a multi-lane highway driving scenario where an autonomous ego vehicle navigates in traffic. We propose a novel receding horizon mixed-integer optimization based method for SLAS with the objective to minimize travel time while accounting for passenger comfort. We further incorporate various modifications in the proposed approach to improve the overall co…
Well-established optimization-based methods can guarantee an optimal trajectory for a short optimization horizon, typically no longer than a few seconds. As a result, choosing the optimal trajectory for this short horizon may still result in a sub-optimal long-term solution. At the same time, the resulting short-term trajectories allow for effective, comfortable and provable safe maneuvers in a dynamic traffic environment. In this work, we address the question of how to ensure an optimal long-term driving strategy, while keeping the benefits of classical trajectory planning. We introduce a Rei…
Implementing an autonomous vehicle that is able to output feasible, smooth and efficient trajectories is a long-standing challenge. Several approaches have been considered, roughly falling under two categories: rule-based and learning-based approaches. The rule-based approaches, while guaranteeing safety and feasibility, fall short when it comes to long-term planning and generalization. The learning-based approaches are able to account for long-term planning and generalization to unseen situations, but may fail to achieve smoothness, safety and the feasibility which rule-based approaches ensur…
University of Bonn（波恩大学）；Aptiv Services Deutschland GmbH（安波福服务德国有限公司）
The ability to predict the future movements of other vehicles is a subconscious and effortless skill for humans and key to safe autonomous driving. Therefore, trajectory prediction for autonomous cars has gained a lot of attention in recent years. It is, however, still a hard task to achieve human-level performance. Interdependencies between vehicle behaviors and the multimodal nature of future intentions in a dynamic and complex driving environment render trajectory prediction a challenging problem. In this work, we propose a new, data-driven approach for predicting the motion of vehicles in …
Opel Automobile GmbH（欧宝汽车有限公司）；TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
The vision of automated driving is to increase both road safety and efficiency, while offering passengers a convenient travel experience. This requires that autonomous systems correctly estimate the current traffic scene and its likely evolution. In highway scenarios early recognition of cut-in maneuvers is essential for risk-aware maneuver planning. In this paper, a statistical approach is proposed, which advantageously utilizes a set of prototypical lane change trajectories to realize both early maneuver detection and uncertainty-aware trajectory prediction for traffic participants. Generati…
Ford AV, LLC（福特自动驾驶汽车有限责任公司）；Ford Motor Company（福特汽车公司）；Xona Space Systems（Xona空间系统公司）
There is a growing need for vehicle positioning information to support Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), Connectivity (V2X), and Autonomous Driving (AD) features. These range from a need for road determination ($<$5 meters), lane determination ($<$1.5 meters), and determining where the vehicle is within the lane ($<$0.3 meters). This paper presents the Ford Highway Driving RTK (Ford-HDR) dataset. This dataset includes nearly 30,000 km of data collected primarily on North American highways during a driving campaign designed to validate driver assistance features in 2018. This includes …
Shanghai University（上海大学）；Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has a great potential for solving complex decision-making problems in autonomous driving, especially in mixed-traffic scenarios where autonomous vehicles and human-driven vehicles (HDVs) drive together. Safety is a key during both the learning and deploying reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms process. In this paper, we formulate the on-ramp merging as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) problem and solve it with an off-policy RL algorithm, i.e., Soft Actor-Critic for Discrete Action Settings (SAC-Discrete). In addition, a motion predictive safety controller inc…
In autonomous driving, detection of abnormal driving behaviors is essential to ensure the safety of vehicle controllers. Prior works in vehicle anomaly detection have shown that modeling interactions between agents improves detection accuracy, but certain abnormal behaviors where structured road information is paramount are poorly identified, such as wrong-way and off-road driving. We propose a novel unsupervised framework for highway anomaly detection named Structural Attention-Based Recurrent VAE (SABeR-VAE), which explicitly uses the structure of the environment to aid anomaly identificatio…
Autonomous vehicles should be able to predict the future states of its environment and respond appropriately. Specifically, predicting the behavior of surrounding human drivers is vital for such platforms to share the same road with humans. Behavior of each of the surrounding vehicles is governed by the motion of its neighbor vehicles. This paper focuses on predicting the behavior of the surrounding vehicles of an autonomous vehicle on highways. We are motivated by improving the prediction accuracy when a surrounding vehicle performs lane change and highway merging maneuvers. We propose a nove…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Toyota Motor North America Research and Development（丰田北美研发公司）
In the event of sensor failure, autonomous vehicles need to safely execute emergency maneuvers while avoiding other vehicles on the road. To accomplish this, the sensor-failed vehicle must predict the future semantic behaviors of other drivers, such as lane changes, as well as their future trajectories given a recent window of past sensor observations. We address the first issue of semantic behavior prediction in this paper, which is a precursor to trajectory prediction, by introducing a framework that leverages the power of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and graphical models. Our goal is to…
Elektrobit Automotive Romania（罗马尼亚Elektrobit汽车公司）；Transilvania University of Brasov（布拉索夫特兰西瓦尼亚大学）
Current state of the art solutions in the control of an autonomous vehicle mainly use supervised end-to-end learning, or decoupled perception, planning and action pipelines. Another possible solution is deep reinforcement learning, but such a method requires that the agent interacts with its surroundings in a simulated environment. In this paper we introduce GridSim, which is an autonomous driving simulator engine running a car-like robot architecture to generate occupancy grids from simulated sensors. We use GridSim to study the performance of two deep learning approaches, deep reinforcement …
POMDP-Based Trajectory Planning for On-Ramp Highway Merging
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克技术大学电气工程学院）；Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics, Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克技术大学捷克信息学、机器人学与控制论研究所）
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Tongji University（同济大学）
Currently decision making is one of the biggest challenges in autonomous driving. This paper introduces a method for safely navigating an autonomous vehicle in highway scenarios by combining deep Q-Networks and insight from control theory. A Deep Q-Network is trained in simulation to serve as a central decision-making unit by proposing targets for a trajectory planner. The generated trajectories in combination with a controller for longitudinal movement are used to execute lane change maneuvers. In order to prove the functionality of this approach it is evaluated on two different highway traff…
Self-driving vehicles (SDVs) hold great potential for improving traffic safety and are poised to positively affect the quality of life of millions of people. To unlock this potential one of the critical aspects of the autonomous technology is understanding and predicting future movement of vehicles surrounding the SDV. This work presents a deep-learning-based method for kinematically feasible motion prediction of such traffic actors. Previous work did not explicitly encode vehicle kinematics and instead relied on the models to learn the constraints directly from the data, potentially resulting…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
It is critical to predict the motion of surrounding vehicles for self-driving planning, especially in a socially compliant and flexible way. However, future prediction is challenging due to the interaction and uncertainty in driving behaviors. We propose planning-informed trajectory prediction (PiP) to tackle the prediction problem in the multi-agent setting. Our approach is differentiated from the traditional manner of prediction, which is only based on historical information and decoupled with planning. By informing the prediction process with the planning of ego vehicle, our method achieves…
IIIT Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术研究所）；University of Tartu（塔尔图大学）
Standard Model Predictive Control (MPC) or trajectory optimization approaches perform only a local search to solve a complex non-convex optimization problem. As a result, they cannot capture the multi-modal characteristic of human driving. A global optimizer can be a potential solution but is computationally intractable in a real-time setting. In this paper, we present a real-time MPC capable of searching over different driving modalities. Our basic idea is simple: we run several goal-directed parallel trajectory optimizations and score the resulting trajectories based on user-defined meta cos…
This paper presents a new method for integrated time-optimal routing and trajectory optimization of multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Our approach extends the well-known Traveling Salesman Problem by accounting for the limited maneuverability of the UAVs due to their kinematic properties. To this end, we allow each waypoint to be traversed with a discretized velocity as well as a discretized flight direction and compute time-optimal trajectories to determine the travel time costs for each edge. We refer to this novel optimization problem as the Trajectory-based Traveling Salesman Pro…
California PATH, University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校加州合作伙伴先进运输技术项目（PATH））；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
As autonomous vehicles (AVs) need to interact with other road users, it is of importance to comprehensively understand the dynamic traffic environment, especially the future possible trajectories of surrounding vehicles. This paper presents an algorithm for long-horizon trajectory prediction of surrounding vehicles using a dual long short term memory (LSTM) network, which is capable of effectively improving prediction accuracy in strongly interactive driving environments. In contrast to traditional approaches which require trajectory matching and manual feature selection, this method can autom…
German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）；Hochschule Emden/Leer, University of Applied Sciences（埃姆登/莱尔应用科学大学）
Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) are envisioned to transform the future industrial and private transportation sectors. However, due to the system's enormous complexity, functional verification and validation of safety aspects are essential before the technology merges into the public domain. Therefore, in recent years, a scenario-driven approach has gained acceptance, emphasizing the requirement of a solid data basis of scenarios. The large-scale research facility Test Bed Lower Saxony (TFNDS) enables the provision of ample information for a database of scenarios on highways. For that p…
FeaXDrive: Feasibility-aware Trajectory-Centric Diffusion Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
College of Automotive and Energy Engineering, Tongji University（同济大学汽车与能源工程学院）；College of Transportation Engineering, Tongji University（同济大学交通工程学院）；School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学机械与航空航天工程学院）
KiGRAS: Kinematic-Driven Generative Model for Realistic Agent Simulation
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Mach Drive（马赫动力）；Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）
The UNC at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）；University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）
Vehicle trajectory prediction is essential for enabling safety-critical intelligent transportation systems (ITS) applications used in management and operations. While there have been some promising advances in the field, there is a need for modern deep learning algorithms that allow real-time trajectory prediction on embedded IoT devices. This article presents DeepTrack, a novel deep learning algorithm customized for real-time vehicle trajectory prediction and monitoring applications in arterial management, freeway management, traffic incident management, and work zone management for high-spee…
Human drivers can recognise fast abnormal driving situations to avoid accidents. Similar to humans, automated vehicles are supposed to perform anomaly detection. In this work, we propose the spatio-temporal graph auto-encoder for learning normal driving behaviours. Our innovation is the ability to jointly learn multiple trajectories of a dynamic number of agents. To perform anomaly detection, we first estimate a density function of the learned trajectory feature representation and then detect anomalies in low-density regions. Due to the lack of multi-agent trajectory datasets for anomaly detec…
Driving in a human-like manner is important for an autonomous vehicle to be a smart and predictable traffic participant. To achieve this goal, parameters of the motion planning module should be carefully tuned, which needs great effort and expert knowledge. In this study, a method of learning cost parameters of a motion planner from naturalistic driving data is proposed. The learning is achieved by encouraging the selected trajectory to approximate the human driving trajectory under the same traffic situation. The employed motion planner follows a widely accepted methodology that first samples…
Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
In dense and dynamic scenarios, planning a safe and comfortable trajectory is full of challenges when traffic participants are driving at high speed. The classic graph search and sampling methods first perform path planning and then configure the corresponding speed, which lacks a strategy to deal with the high-speed obstacles. Decoupling optimization methods perform motion planning in the S-L and S-T domains respectively. These methods require a large free configuration space to plan the lane change trajectory. In dense dynamic scenes, it is easy to cause the failure of trajectory planning an…
Institut de Recherche en Communications et Cybernétique de Nantes（南特通信与控制论研究所）
The subject of this paper is about the kinematic analysis and the trajectory planning of the Orthoglide 5-axis. The Orthoglide 5-axis a five degrees of freedom parallel kinematic machine developed at IRCCyN and is made up of a hybrid architecture, namely, a three degrees of freedom translational parallel manip-ulator mounted in series with a two degrees of freedom parallel spherical wrist. The simpler the kinematic modeling of the Or-thoglide 5-axis, the higher the maximum frequency of its control loop. Indeed, the control loop of a parallel kinematic machine should be computed with a high fre…
Many methods have been developed in trajectory planning in order to achieve smooth and accurate motion with considering the constraints of kinematics constraints such as angular position, velocity, acceleration, and jerk. The problem of using the combination of n-order polynomials is that there is no ideally match between the segments of trajectory path at the via point in terms of the number of kinematic constraints. It leads to generate undesirable trajectory path at the via point that connects between two segments of the trajectory path. In this paper, we aim to investigate the effect of in…
University of Utah Robotics Center（犹他大学机器人中心）；School of Computing, University of Utah（犹他大学计算机学院）
This paper proposes a novel approach to performing in-grasp manipulation: the problem of moving an object with reference to the palm from an initial pose to a goal pose without breaking or making contacts. Our method to perform in-grasp manipulation uses kinematic trajectory optimization which requires no knowledge of dynamic properties of the object. We implement our approach on an Allegro robot hand and perform thorough experiments on 10 objects from the YCB dataset. However, the proposed method is general enough to generate motions for most objects the robot can grasp. Experimental result s…
Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；University of Twente（特文特大学）
Soft robots are interesting examples of hyper-redundancy in robotics, however, the nonlinear continuous dynamics of these robots and the use of hyper-elastic and visco-elastic materials makes modeling of these robots more complicated. This study presents a geometric Inverse Kinematic (IK) model for trajectory tracking of multi-segment extensible soft robots, where, each segment of the soft actuator is geometrically approximated with multiple rigid links connected with rotary and prismatic joints. Using optimization methods, the desired configuration variables of the soft actuator for the desir…
